


A Deceptively Quiet Event

by virdant



Category: Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi | Spirited Away
Genre: Drowning, Gen, Memory Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-12
Updated: 2018-05-12
Packaged: 2019-05-05 05:50:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14610852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/virdant/pseuds/virdant
Summary: The stars stretch out in a long band, winding through the night sky like a river, and then Chihiro remembers.





	A Deceptively Quiet Event

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anthropologicalhands](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthropologicalhands/gifts).



* * *

 

 

The stars stretch out in a long band, winding through the night sky like a river, and then Chihiro remembers.

 

* * *

 

The Kohaku river is gone; after Chihiro remembers, she visits the apartment complex that has replaced it, standing on the sidewalk and staring up at smooth concrete and clear glass. She goes back day after day, night after night, the lights of the building illuminating the night with no reflection.

Her parents ask her what she’s looking for, her father tells her she should be focusing on her future instead of visiting a building, her mother asks if she wants to study architecture.

Chihiro stops visiting the complex. The river is dry and gone, and there are no ghosts in the concrete and glass that has grown in its place.

 

* * *

 

For all that she cannot recall them, the vibrant memories of Yubaba’s onsen are still embedded in the synapses of Chihiro’s brain. She sinks into bathwater so hot that steam curls around her cheeks, and she remembers a creature with no face, just the smooth porcelain of a mask, a stink spirit filled with the debris of civilization, a boy who was a dragon. She starts high school and in the raucous laughter of the boys in her class, remembers a baby and its wants. She sits before her teachers and remembers a witch who took her name from her.

“You’re an only child, right, Ogino-chan?” her classmates ask, one day, and Chihiro remembers a woman named Lin who could have been her elder sister.

She has no siblings, she says, and it is the truth.

When Valentine’s day comes, she makes obligation chocolate for her classmates; the chocolates are round and smooth, nothing like konpeitou, which she can no longer eat without remembering a spider in a boiler room.

“Don’t you like anybody, Ogino-chan?”

Nobody here, she does not say. She sees a boy whenever she closes her eyes, but never when she looks in the world around her. And she looks.

Oh, she looks.

She does not go to where the Kohaku river used to be, not anymore. But she looks everywhere else—in concreted banded rivers as they follow their prescriptive paths, in streams of snowmelt as they make their way to the gutter, in the rush of floodwater as it churns through the streets and the sewers.

She looks in the faces of the boys she meets, searching for the churning of a river after snowmelt, the coolness in the face of humid summer heat, the kindness and generosity of a boy who was once a dragon.

She looks.

 

* * *

 

 

The closest stars to the solar system are the Centauri stars, approximately four light years away. Alpha Centauri A and B appear to blur, and Proxima Centauri is too faint to be seen without a telescope, but they exist, as much as one could know that stars exist.

There are dead stars that are still observable from Earth; emitting light a thousand years ago, the light has made its way across the galaxy, one light year at a time, and a thousand years after they finally burn out, people will look up and see only darkness where there once was a star.

It will take four years for scientists on Earth to learn that one of the Centauri stars has died. It will take longer for scientists to observe the deaths of any of the other stars in the sky.

Chihiro looks up at the sky. Late at night, surrounded by the lights of the surrounding buildings, the pollution drowns out the all but the brightest of stars.

When morning dawns, the sun rises—the brightest star in the sky, so bright it obscures all of the other stars.

 

* * *

 

 

“You’ve become very quiet,” her mother says over dinner. Her father doesn’t say anything, preoccupied with his meal. Chihiro watches him, and she can see the cloven hooves of a hog if she stares too intently.

Chihiro murmurs something about the food, but she’s lost her appetite.

 

* * *

 

 

Their class takes a trip to an onsen high in the mountains; before they fill up the busses, they first take the train, their class taking up several train cars as they sit in pairs under the watchful eyes of their teachers.

Chihiro sits still, remembering a different train ride. Her classmate twists in her seat to talk to others across the aisle, and Chihiro stares as the scenery rushes past, careening perpendicular as she watches. If she closes her eyes, then she’s sitting with her back to the windows, a creature with no face sitting placidly beside her. If she closes her eyes.

Chihiro tilts her head towards the thin stream of air from the air conditioning vent in the ceiling. The train hurtles on, the wind rushing by, but inside Chihiro feels only a trickle of cool, dry air.

At the onsen, Chihiro shares a room with dozens of other girls, their steady breathing lulling her to sleep with uncanny familiarity.

She has slept here, in an onsen, surrounded by other bodies.

Late at night, she creeps from her futon and pads down the hallway in slippered feet until she finds her way outside. The lights by the hot springs are dimmed due to the late hour, but the steam still casts its shadow, unfurling sinuous tendrils towards the sky.

She remembers the fragrant herbal water as it poured into the bath, tumbling in a torrent of deep water. She remembers polished floorboards beneath her feet as she flees, up and down stairs, from a ravenous spirit

She turns from the onsen and returns to bed, lying beside warm bodies still in sleep.

When she wakes, her nails have dug a thin line in her palms, like the bite of fishing wire as she unplugged a river spirit clogged with pollution.

 

* * *

 

Chihiro returns to the Kohaku river, to concrete paths set where a river had once been. She stands on solid ground instead of drowning—

Chihiro almost drowned once, when she was a small child. Her parents had looked away and she had tumbled into the Kohaku river. For too long, there was nothing but paralyzing fear.

Her hands pressed down into the water. Her head tipped back.

She did not scream.

She stands on solid ground and remembers the water that wrapped around her so heavily, like a weighted blanket, suffocating her. The water is not cold or warm, it just surrounds her and she cannot breathe.

A dragon coils under her legs. A boy takes her by the hand. She emerges with her feet planted on solid ground, and when she inhales there is no water in her lungs.

Chihiro stands on the banks of what used to be the Kohaku river. She is no longer drowning, but she still has nothing to say.

 

* * *

 

They say that if you go into the mountains, or the desert, or even to the middle of the ocean—somewhere far away from civilization—and wait, then when night comes, so do the stars, rising from the horizon, speckling their way across the darkness.

They say that they illuminate the night better than streetlights lining concrete.

After Chihiro graduates from high school, she goes travelling alone. Her classmates have planned an onsen trip, but she begs off. There are no more memories to mine from fragrant steam and polished wooden floors.

Instead, she goes into the mountains.

In the darkness, Chihiro looks up at the night sky, a river of stars banding its way across an unobscured expanse, and as a breeze stirs, she can feel horns within her clenched fists, the lash of wind as she flies on the back of a dragon—

She slowly lifts her arms, as if fighting a massive weight, as if to catch the stars. She tips her head forward, tucking her chin in, and then back. She inhales.

“Nigihayami Kohakunushi!”

And from the stars, a boy named Haku extends a hand.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Mario Vittone's article [Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning](http://mariovittone.com/2010/05/154/).
> 
> For Ellie, who asked for a space AU of spirited away. This is not a space AU. Oops.
> 
> __
> 
> Comments and kudos always appreciated.
> 
> Liked this? [Reblog on Tumblr](https://virdant.tumblr.com/post/173811939881/fic-spirited-away) | [Retweet on Twitter](https://twitter.com/virdant/status/995091728200679425)
> 
> Want to talk writing? Find me as @virdant on [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/virdant) | [Twitter](https://twitter.com/virdant)


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